Casabe
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A Casabe cake is a thin, flat unleavened bread made from the cassava root (known in some parts of Latin America as mandioca, manioc or yuca). The Casabe was originally produced by the Native American Arawak and Carib nations because these roots were a very common plant of the rain forests where they lived. In eastern Venezuela many Native American ethnic groups still make casabe and it remains their main bread-like food. Native American communities like the Ye-Kuana, Kari-Ña, Yanomami, Guarao or Warao are from either the Caribe or Arawac Nations and still make Casabe.
There are two kinds of Yuca roots: The "sweet" yuca which is eaten directly after boiling it, put into thick soups, or used as a dough-based ingredient in many dishes, and "bitter" yuca which is poisonous and must be processed before eaten. "Bitter" Yuca is used to make Casabe, a widely spread Native American bread, which was much more common than any cereal based bread in the pre-columbian cultures of the Caribbean, and still is in the remaining endemic communities. In Venezuela alone there are about 400,000 Native American people of around 100 different ethnic groups that speak around 75 different languages or dialects and many of them still live as they have for thousands of years, deep in the rain forest with barely any contact with European cultures.
To make casabe, bitter Yuca is ground to a pulp and squeezed with a sebucan, an 8 to 12 foot long tube-shaped strainer woven of palm leaves. The sebucan is usually hung from a tree branch or ceiling pole, and it has a closed end with a loop that is attached to a fixed stick or lever, when the lever is pushed down, the specially woven fibers of the strainer squeeze the yuca pulp, eliminating a milky, bitter liquid called yare which carries the poisonous substances with it out of the pulp. The strained pulp is spread on a budare to roast or toast in thin, round cakes about 2 feet in diameter.
Thin and crisp cakes of casabe are often broken apart and eaten like crackers. It can be eaten alone or can accompany other dishes just as bread. Thicker variety are usually eaten slightly moistened, just a subtle sprinkle of a few drops of liquid is enough to transform the Casabe cake into a very soft and smooth bread very similar to the softest slice of a wheat bread loaf, an incredible change in texture. Because of its capacity to absorb liquid immediately, it may cause someone to choke, but will quickly drift down with a sip of liquid.
See Carmen Sosa, Casabe, Editorial Arte: Caracas, 1979.
[edit] External links
- Casabe: Garífuna Yucca Bread shows traditional preparation of cassava into casabe.
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